BMO Global Asset Management has launched its new podcast series, “Better conversations. Better outcomes.” The 33-episode series provides actionable ideas to expand advisors’ businesses and tools to improve the quality of conversations between advisors and their clients. The series launched on September 12 and the first season will conclude in the first quarter of 2017.
The series seeks to tackle some of the challenging conversations that advisors face with their clients and provides access to industry experts across a broad spectrum of the wealth management industry. Each episode will be 15 to 30 minutes and topics range from retirement planning, use of alternative investment, and fixed income to niche subjects such as living to 100, women and wealth, tax loss harvesting and much more.
I spoke with Ben Jones, managing director of intermediary distribution for BMO Global Asset Management and series co-host, about the series on September 16.
You’ve recently embarked on a major initiative, a series of podcasts called “Better conversations. Better outcomes.” Before we talk about that series, I’d like our readers to learn a little more about BMO Global Asset Management. How is your firm positioned in the asset management industry? What is the unique value that you bring to advisors and their clients?
BMO Global Asset Management is one of the 100 largest asset managers globally. We manage approximately $234 billion and we operate from a core set of beliefs. We believe in specialized investment teams who are empowered to focus on what they do best; open access to our portfolio managers and experts, so our clients know exactly what they’re thinking and why; and being easy to do business with by giving advisors a range of investment vehicles and share classes to access the formats that work best for their clients’ needs.
As far as a firm, we have a belief that in today’s environment, with the increased pressures of pending DOL rules as well as technology, like robo advisors, it is putting the interpersonal aspects of an advisor’s job at the forefront of their success as well as their clients’ success. We believe that better conversations result in better outcomes for advisors and their clients. We seek to enhance those conversations through ideas, access and ease of our solutions and advisor tools.
The podcast series was done in connection with the BMO Wealth Institute. What is that institute and how can advisors benefit from it?
The Wealth Institute is a collection of experts, both internal and external, who come together with their collective expertise to provide insights and strategies around wealth planning and financial decisions. It’s an effort to better prepare people for a confident financial future. The Wealth Institute used to be called the Retirement Institute, but we broadened the mandate a few years ago to cover all aspects of wealth planning.
The Institute’s reports are written with an end-investor audience in mind, and it’s done purposefully so that advisors can use them to educate their clients on topics relevant to their particular situation. The topics that the Wealth Institute covers are very broad, ranging from retirement to planning issues, tax issues and insurance topics.
What led to this podcast initiative?
The starting point was our value proposition: better conversations lead to better outcomes. From there, we started looking at the ways we could make it easy for advisors to access ideas from experts, both internally, externally and maybe even more importantly, from their peers. That meant not putting the information behind a password-protected site or having to send it to an advisor or different groups of advisors in a one-off manner. Instead, we wanted to provide content that could be shared endemically throughout the community. For those reasons we looked at all the different media and delivery mechanisms, and it naturally led to podcasts as the ideal choice for delivering this content to advisors.
You mentioned that some of the people who are participating are peers. Did you work with advisors in developing the series?
Yes, we certainly solicited topics and ideas from many different advisors around the country, as well as from different niches of advisors that might focus on corporate retirement plans versus high-net worth. We wanted to get an idea of the topics that they found most relevant as well as some of the conversations they found challenging, so we could add value by seeking experts who could help them with those conversations. We also have a number of advisors who will be joining the podcast and sharing what works both in their practices and for them personally.
As you know, there’s nothing more powerful than learning from someone who’s already put that concept into practice.
What are some of the topics you plan to cover?
In season one, we’re covering a number of different topics like environmental, sustainable and governance (ESG) investing, which is the expression of your social views through your investments, and conversations around who will be your caregiver. We also cover a number of practice management concepts, like telling your story and leveraging social media for digital conversations. On the practice management front, we also have embedded in season one an eight-part mini-series called “Building an Effective Practice.” That features a series of interviews with the management consultant, coach and mentor, Steve Moore. He’s the author of Ineffective Habits of Financial Advisors and the Disciplines to Break Them.
Is the series geared to specific types of advisors, for example those who serve a client in either the accumulation or de-accumulation stage?
It’s not geared to one or the other. We believe that wealth management is a lot more than just the different stages of accumulation and de-accumulation. We’re going to be exploring all aspects of wealth management, which we define as everything in life that takes time, planning and money.
I listened to the first episode, which featured Matt Smith, a co-author of Someday Rich: Planning for Sustainable Tomorrows Today, and it described four investor archetypes. What are investor archetypes and how can advisors use that information to better serve their clients?
Simply put, an archetype is an investor personality temperament – the cognitive and emotional way that an individual sees the world. There are four different investor archetypes that we’ve identified: guardians, artisans, idealists and rationals.
This is important to advisors because when the advisor understands their client’s archetype, as well as their own for that matter, they can connect with those clients at a deeper level by understanding what drives them to make financial decisions. Even more importantly, when an advisor understands the tendencies of particular archetypes, they can more readily protect clients from their own vulnerabilities. For example, artisans are vulnerable to speculative investments.
You also provide some supplemental information along with each podcast, including in this case, a conversation guide and a quiz to help advisors or their clients determine their own archetypes. What feedback have you received from advisors about how they’re using this supplemental information?
We just released the series, so the responses are still coming in. But so far, they’ve exceeded our expectations, especially mine, personally. I’ve had a number of different advisors reach out and express their excitement around the tools and content.
Did you take the quiz to learn what type of archetype you are? What did you learn about your own investing biases and preferences?
I did take the quiz and I was a bit surprised -- I thought I would have been a guardian. When I took the quiz, I was nearly a 50/50 mix of artisan and rational. I realized that describes me quite perfectly after I dove in and got to know those personality archetypes a little bit better. To some extent, those archetypes help balance out each other’s vulnerabilities, which is a good thing for me.
From an investing standpoint, it helped me understand why I like to learn about leading-edge concepts. But I’m always quite skeptical at first until I really dig in and understand the content very well.
I also listened to the second episode of the podcast called “Living to 100.” One of the things you pointed out is that Baby Boomers’ retirement lifespans may be longer than their working lifespans. You interviewed a noted gerontologist, Dr. Alexis Abramson. What is gerontology, and why should advisors care about this field of study?
Gerontology is the scientific study of aging and the effects it has on humans. Advisors should care immensely about this topic, especially today, for two reasons.
First, people are living longer and longer. As you pointed out, many of them will be retired longer than they may have worked in their working life. Accordingly, they need to plan for that financially. Second, advisors need to become more familiar with topics that are beyond just the financial matters. They’re uniquely positioned to help clients navigate topics that historically may not have been as prominent, like cognitive function and their clients’ mental abilities and decision-making, caregiving and the social development and loneliness that some clients face in their 30 bonus years.
Dr. Abramson talked about some of the keys to living a longer, healthier life. What were some of the things that she said that were surprising to you?
She talked about the four keys to longevity. There were three things in particular that I found a little bit surprising. First of all, we think of cognitive functioning as something that you exercise, like Sudoku or different puzzles, to keep your mind sharp. But just the simplicity of switching things in your daily or normal routine helps the mind function and stay sharp.
Second was the massive impact that social interactions have on a person’s happiness. Very little planning goes into thinking about when you lose so much of your social network because it was housed in your 40-hours-a-week work, and what an impact that can have on one’s retirement years. Finally, there was a tip around body and health – to drink enough water. To figure out your recommended daily consumption in ounces, take your body weight in pounds and divide by two, which for me was 110 ounces of water per day -- that’s a lot of water! That was pretty staggering to me.
What were some of the things that you learned about how advisors can help their clients deal with the challenges of aging?
This is where advisors are in such a unique position to have positive impacts on the non-financial aspects of clients’ happiness and to make those golden years truly golden. Let me just give you a couple of things that I took away for advisors from Dr. Abramson.
First of all, advisors can help in the social aspects of their clients’ lives. Advisors can connect their clients with other clients at client appreciation or market-update events. Clients can have more social interactions and get to know other clients that the advisor might be working with and reap the positive impact from social networking.
The second was around mind. Rather than going through your routine update and following the normal course of discussion, advisors should change things up a bit to help keep clients’ minds sharp. Advisors should consider providing them with content that’s a little out of the norm of what you normally present in a quarterly or annual-update meeting.
Then, with respect to the body, advisors should change up the venue, do walking meetings or go to a healthier place. Take the onus off of the client a bit by saying, “Hey, I’m on a health kick. Would you mind if we did a walking meeting?” rather than, “Hey, I think you need to do this,” which might be overstepping your bounds as an advisor.
Last, which advisors are very well equipped to discuss, is financial matters. This is really the foundation that makes all of the rest of the keys to a happy and healthy retirement possible.
I realize that this has only been recently introduced and you’re still getting feedback from advisors. But based on those with whom you have spoken and on the research that you’ve done, how do you think advisors can best use this series to help their clients?
First and foremost, we cover a lot of different aspects of wealth advising and some advisors might be very well versed in some and not as well versed in others. I would suggest that advisors listen to the topics focusing in areas where they are currently either having challenges or maybe haven’t developed the processes in their practice to have those conversations with their clients.
Advisors shouldn’t try to do everything at once but should pick the most actionable things around the areas that can have the biggest impact for their client demographic and their practice and incorporate those ideas. We’ve worked to make those ideas very easy to use by providing conversation guides and tools to be able to easily implement them into practice. Test-driving those tools allows the advisor to tailor those concepts to the way that their practice runs.
I would add that we’d love to get feedback on ways that we can continue to improve the tools. If one of your readers has ideas for topics or future guests or maybe even a best practice that they think can help their peers, we would love to hear from them.
Read more articles by Robert Huebscher
BMO Global Asset Management has launched its new podcast series, “Better conversations. Better outcomes.” The 33-episode series provides actionable ideas to expand advisors’ businesses and tools to improve the quality of conversations between advisors and their clients. The series launched on September 12 and the first season will conclude in the first quarter of 2017.
